


Truth, beauty, hunger

by SilverShepard



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Buried Alive, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Magic, Sacrifice, Sibling Incest, no one dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 15:59:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15952709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverShepard/pseuds/SilverShepard
Summary: Al wants Edward to have his alchemy back. Sacrifice is something he knows.





	Truth, beauty, hunger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_Creative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Creative/gifts).



His lover is lean and golden underneath him, and the world is liquid and warm. He moves as if in a dream and his lover cries out, over and over, and he stopped hearing the difference between pleasure and pain a long time ago. If it ever mattered, it doesn't any longer. They have been here all their lives, in the cradling half-light, in the stone nest so far away from the sun. 

His love for the body—the person, he must hold onto that—under him is absolute; he is in bliss here with his own body sheathed so firmly in his lover's. 

His lover and his golden-brown hair, his lover with the familiar-unfamiliar skin, beloved and yet somehow new. _Al, Al_ , he must remember Al, but his release takes him again and the faint train of his thoughts scatters apart again. 

They have been here all their lives. 

*

Al brought him here. His big eyes, so changeable in the light, and Ed could never refuse him again, could hardly think for the stars that filled his head every time he looked at Al's beautiful, human face. Come with me, he'd said. I found something, you need to see it. 

It was Al, and so he followed, and they came to the strange building in the cliffs at the end of the desert. Ed liked it, liked the rough fanciful carvings in the rock, the passages and balconies and windows in the cliff face. It must have been created with alchemy, but long ago, so long ago that all the transmutation marks were gone and ground away with the sand and the wind and the endless pressure of the desert. It bit at his heart, as the arcing blue light in his memories always did. It wasn't regret, because nothing was too high a price for Al and Al's bottomless eyes, but it was a loss greater than his arm had been, a loss that abraded his self away with every passing month. 

Ed didn't know who he was if he wasn't an alchemist, but he knew enough to shield Al from his pain. He would always try to shield Al.

His mistake, as always, was in underestimating him. 

*

The stone melted around them, flowing without any sign of alchemic reaction. They were sealed in now, two boys in the cradle of stone and no way out but success, defeat or death. Al could transmute a passage out whenever he liked, but he wouldn't. Ed knew he wouldn't. That would mean failure and no second chance. 

So they would die here, together in the rock, or Al would succeed, would make a crucible of his brother and forge him anew. Offer himself as sacrifice, as tribute, force his brother's fighting spirit to rouse again, and leave this cliff-face tomb with this older, wilder power over the world's forces. 

The incense was drugged, and honeyed wine soft on their tongues, the scented oil rich where it shone on Al's golden skin. This old power wanted sacrifice, wanted a show of commitment, and Ed had only to take the gift offered him. He only had to take his brother's innocence, his joy and his pain, take his first experience of love and feed it to this old, unfathomable thing. A thing that begat the Truth, older and more bloodthirsty. 

They would starve here if Ed refused him. Their friends thought that Ed was built of grit and the spirit of a mule, but that was only because they had never faced down Al when it counted. 

*

It was not his innocence Al gave; what price was that? Ed thought it was, but Ed valued things differently where Al was concerned. His virginity was a moment's gift, nothing fit for tribute in this time and place. No, this was a deeper sacrifice, a collapsing of possibilities into this one moment. His brother's cock slid inside him and Al's futures pared themselves away, leaving nothing but this, here, forever. Al would love no one but his brother, not now. For himself he counted it no sacrifice at all, but the power sleeping in the rock licked and lapped at the choices not made; the princess, or the children, the home, or Winry laughing next to him in their bed. It was well fed and well content, and its exchange was generous. 

They rose up after, golden both, and Edward touched his fingertips together and yellow light rose up against Al's blue, and the world shaped itself for him again. As Al had shaped himself. As Edward would learn Al had shaped himself. 

Edward was a young god again, the way he'd been meant, and if Al was his other face, his counterpart and shadow, then that was everything he'd ever wanted.


End file.
